Jun. 11th, 2017

Jun. 11th, 2017

As we’re sure everyone is aware at this point, LiveJournal has changed its Terms of Service with the new User Agreement. This new agreement says that any content deemed adult under Russian law must be marked as adult on LiveJournal or the journal/community risks deletion without prior warning; “adult” can mean any LBGTQ+ content, no matter what the actual rating is.

We have already changed the adult content settings on the LiveJournal comm to protect the members of this community. This is not a change we agree with; we simply have dozens of members who have not participated in recent years and we do not want to risk their work being deleted. We have not and never will require slash, femslash, and poly fanworks to be rated higher than gen or het fanworks.

The new “adult content” setting means that minors cannot participate on LiveJournal and any person who isn’t logged into LJ must click an age-check banner both to enter the community and also to read individual posts.

Another part of the new ToS says any post that receives more than 3000 hits in 24 hours is subject to review under Article 10.2 of the Federal Act of the Russian Federation No. 149-03. (Go here for an English translation of the law.) While we do not and cannot know how any B2MeM posts fare hits-wise and we believe that fandom is not the target of this law, it is something we are wary about.

Furthermore, there was a recent report that LiveJournal has implemented a new spam blocker. We do not know what the algorithm detects. It is indiscriminate and targets both locked and unlocked posts. This has resulted in some journals and communities in another fandom being deleted without warning; some of them have not been restored despite asking.

We do know that AO3 and DeviantArt are on the whitelist. It appears that smaller fandom archives such as SWG or Faerie are not and links to them are thus considered spam.

Given the above information, we are seeking your input on the future of Back to Middle-earth Month on LiveJournal. We are interested in your opinions on importing the LJ comm to Dreamwidth and which site you would prefer B2MeM to be hosted on.

You do NOT need to be a member of B2MeM on LiveJournal to participate; the survey is hosted offsite. We encourage everyone interested in the future of B2MeM no matter your primary platform to answer these questions. We also encourage you to signal boost this survey so that we can reach as wide an audience as possible.

If the decision is made to move to Dreamwidth, we will not delete B2MeM from LiveJournal. The LJ comm was created as a way for multiple groups to participate in B2MeM without needing to be hosted by a particular group. As B2MeM became its own thing, not run by the groups, the LJ community became even more a necessity. There are half a dozen years of history on this community, as well as an untold number of links pointing to it. This is not something we take lightly.

As we’re sure everyone is aware at this point, LiveJournal has changed its Terms of Service with the new User Agreement. This new agreement says that any content deemed adult under Russian law must be marked as adult on LiveJournal or the journal/community risks deletion without prior warning; “adult” can mean any LBGTQ+ content, no matter what the actual rating is.

We have already changed the adult content settings on the LiveJournal comm to protect the members of this community. This is not a change we agree with; we simply have dozens of members who have not participated in recent years and we do not want to risk their work being deleted. We have not and never will require slash, femslash, and poly fanworks to be rated higher than gen or het fanworks.

The new “adult content” setting means that minors cannot participate on LiveJournal and any person who isn’t logged into LJ must click an age-check banner both to enter the community and also to read individual posts.

Another part of the new ToS says any post that receives more than 3000 hits in 24 hours is subject to review under Article 10.2 of the Federal Act of the Russian Federation No. 149-03. (Go here for an English translation of the law.) While we do not and cannot know how any B2MeM posts fare hits-wise and we believe that fandom is not the target of this law, it is something we are wary about.

Furthermore, there was a recent report that LiveJournal has implemented a new spam blocker. We do not know what the algorithm detects. It is indiscriminate and targets both locked and unlocked posts. This has resulted in some journals and communities in another fandom being deleted without warning; some of them have not been restored despite asking.

We do know that AO3 and DeviantArt are on the whitelist. It appears that smaller fandom archives such as SWG or Faerie are not and links to them are thus considered spam.

Given the above information, we are seeking your input on the future of Back to Middle-earth Month on LiveJournal. We are interested in your opinions on importing the LJ comm to Dreamwidth and which site you would prefer B2MeM to be hosted on.

You do NOT need to be a member of B2MeM on LiveJournal to participate; the survey is hosted offsite. We encourage everyone interested in the future of B2MeM no matter your primary platform to answer these questions. We also encourage you to signal boost this survey so that we can reach as wide an audience as possible.

If the decision is made to move to Dreamwidth, we will not delete B2MeM from LiveJournal. The LJ comm was created as a way for multiple groups to participate in B2MeM without needing to be hosted by a particular group. As B2MeM became its own thing, not run by the groups, the LJ community became even more a necessity. There are half a dozen years of history on this community, as well as an untold number of links pointing to it. This is not something we take lightly.